https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/nov/04/quincy-jones-obituary
"From the 1980s onwards, Quincy Jones, who has died aged 91, was best known for
his production and arranging work with Michael Jackson, not least because his
efforts on Jackson’s album
Thriller helped make it one of the bestselling
albums in pop history. But the superstar glare surrounding his work with
Jackson tended to conceal the fact that there were many more layers to Jones’s
abilities.
He worked with jazz stars such as Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie, became a
friend and collaborator of Frank Sinatra, and developed a flourishing career as
a composer of soundtracks for film and TV. He enjoyed success under his own
name in styles ranging from big-band jazz and swing to pop, soul and funk. He
became an influential music business executive, a successful entrepreneur in
film and TV production and launched the music magazine
VIBE.
He was born in Chicago, the son of Quincy Jones Sr, a carpenter and semi-pro
baseball player, and his wife, Sarah (nee Wells), a building manager. His
parents divorced, Quincy Sr remarried, and the family moved to Bremerton,
Washington, during the second world war, then to Seattle. Quincy Jr began
playing the trumpet and singing in a gospel quartet at the age of 12, and when
he met up with the teenaged Ray Charles, also based in the Seattle area,
Charles encouraged him to take an interest in arranging. A course at the
Berklee College of Music in Boston set Jones up for his first professional job,
in 1951, with the bandleader Lionel Hampton.
His experiences on the road with the Hampton band were an eye-opener. “You
couldn’t stay in white hotels, and to me, coming from Seattle, a lot of this
stuff was like a slap in the face,” he said. “Back then, all the black bands
had white bus drivers so they could eat, ’cos you couldn’t go into white
restaurants. Even in Philadelphia, they had segregated hotels.” Jones left
Hampton in 1953, having accompanied the band on a European tour and rubbed
shoulders with a remarkable lineup of musicians including the trumpeters
Clifford Brown and Art Farmer."
RIP,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics